Chuck's Produce breaks ground on Salmon Creek store

View full sizePeter Beland/Special to The OregonianConstruction began this summer on a second Chuck's Produce & Street Market, this one in Vancouver's Salmon Creek area. The store is expected to be completed next spring.

Vancouver-based Chuck's Produce & Street Market has broken ground on its second store, encouraged by waivers on county business fees and the central tenet to any retail enterprise: location.

The 47,370-square-foot store and an attached, to-be-leased 14,000-square-foot retail space are at the northeast corner of Highway 99 and 117th Street in Salmon Creek.

According to Mike Livermore, the general manager of Chuck's Mill Plain Boulevard location, the estimated $10 million project will employ 120 to 130 people upon completion in the spring of 2013.

According to Clark County development director Marty Snell, the Salmon Creek area is underserved for groceries. "They don't have a grocery like this," he said.

Chuck's officials gathered survey information over 18 months during prize-drawing events to gauge consumer interest in a second location in the Salmon Creek area and received a "tremendous response," Livermore says.

The organic grocer is looking for a third location along the Interstate 5 corridor.

Chuck's was founded by Vancouver businessman Bart Colson, a partner in the Hawthorn Retirement Group, to address what he saw as a lack of quality grocery stores in the community.

When Colson moved to the Vancouver area from Salem, he missed locally sourced produce and other goods. After he and his colleagues studied the Vancouver area's grocery store landscape, he built a market modeled after the Bay Area's Berkeley Bowl, which emphasizes quality and diversity.

"(He) has always been enthusiastic about local produce, artisan breads and everything made from scratch," says Livermore.

Despite Colson's interest and consumer demand, business permit fees were a significant hurdle to developing the second store. Clark County's traffic-impact fee alone was initially $908,000. With an independent traffic study, Chuck's brought that number down to $474,000, then, thanks to a fee waiver, to $237,000.

The fee waiver is contained in county Resolution 2012-02-1, which reduces a number of business application fees by 50 percent for selected businesses that create 10 or more jobs. County commissioners passed the resolution in February and extended it in May to cover business permit fees through the end of 2013.

"We hope that this will spur private-sector economic development. Where businesses are on the bubble ... this is an incentive for them to pull the trigger," says Snell.